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Monthly Archives: August 2010

Lizzy wanted somewhere to keep all the rechargeable batteries her house gets through once she’d charged them. Sick of them getting mixed up and having to recharge them, she asked me to make her something to keep them in. Suuuuuuure a margerine tub or a block of wood with holes would have done the job, but when you have a laser cutter and an itching to play with CAD, why not do both?

I wanted a way to allow visitors to my blog to subscribe to it and get email notifications when I updated it with something new. Subscribe2, a plugin available on the WordPress site seemed like just the ticket. It installed easily and worked well with no tweaking, however I didn’t like unsightly “Unsubscribe” button that it added with the subscribe button.

Having looked around online I couldn’t find a tutorial or post on how to remove it, so decided to work it out myself and post this here in case anyone else had the same problem.

I had to layout a 28-pin SSOP package in EasyPC (a PCB design package) at work today so that I could include it in a PCB for a new instrument we’re designing. To check the layout was correct I printed it out to offer it up against the chip.

Amazed at the teeny tinyness of the thing, I had a shot at taking photographs of it down the microscope in my lunch break. You can see the dots of the printer where the pads will be next to the pins.

At Steve‘s suggestion today I experimented with coating stainless steel with spray paint and then using the laser to etch away parts of the paint to reveal the metal beneath. I think you’ll agree the results were pretty impressive…

When Lez came to visit for the UK Instructablers meet up in July, he brought with him a bag full of beer mats that he’d picked up from a car boot sale for £5. Among the 50 or so mats are some of the early Guinness ones, one from the 1972 Munich Olympics and several from the 1976 Moscow Olympics. Also in the bag were some nice sets of old mats with cartoons and jokes on the rear.

With all these awesome old sets of mats to almost double the size of my collection I thought it was time to find somewhere to keep them that would protect them a bit more than the duffed up old cardboard box they’ve been living in until now.

I’ve been obsessed with the laser cutter ever since Steve bought it and I had some acrylic left over from the chess board that I made for the Instructables gift exchange. This was the perfect opportunity to a) use the laser cutter again, and b) try out Oomlout‘s acrylic joining method.

Here’s the finished box I made, there’s a longer description of the process below.

Kev at work wanted a way to align the satellite on his caravan better; depending on his location in the country it needed to be a different inclination. I threw together this little quarter circle protractor with pointer using Alibre, then exported it as a .dxf to the laser cutter.

Cut in translucent 3mm acrylic, the etching’s come out really nicely. The large lines divide the 90° segment into 10° divisions and the smaller ones subdivide into 2° divisions. (click the image to biggerate)

(more pictures after the break)

Last week I published my Toast Stencils instructable as my entry into the DadCanDo contest. After it got featured I challenged the Instructables community to have a go and post pictures of their attempts in order to win a 3 month pro membership.